After six seasons on Fox's MADtv, Korean American funnyman extraordinaire Bobby Lee is busting out with a new movie and a top-secret (well, not really), incredibly cool (absolutely) and drop-dead hilarious (almost certainly) series concept in development at Comedy Central.

Comedy is one of the numerous things I geek on, so bear with me when I say that there are four kinds of comedians.

You have your monsters -- comic creatures driven by unrestrained id and, all too often, liberal self-medication. You have your acrobats -- humorists of timing and reflex, who rely on nimble wit and verbal fluency to dance into and around the funny. You have your artists, who see the audience as an annoying necessity that enables a larger and more abstract act of subversion. And you have your craftsmen -- comics who groove to the technical aspects of humor, obsessed with fine-tuning the formula for maximum kill:dud ratio.

The great comedians, the comics we view with mythic awe, tend to be the ones who fit into multiple categories. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, was an acrobat who toiled for laughs like a craftsman and had a dark splash of monster in his soul. Richard Pryor was the monster as artist, or vice versa. Lenny Bruce -- Lenny Bruce was all four, to a tragically self-destructive degree.

It's a little soon yet to be mentioning Bobby Lee in the same breath as those three -- or John Belushi or Steve Martin or, heck, Dave Chappelle, for that matter -- but on the strength of sheer talent alone, he belongs in that cluster of young stand-ups jostling for position just outside the halls of greatness. Lee has a screwed-up, go-for-broke shamelessness that hints of the monster lurking inside his psyche. He has the ability to wring laughs from a crowd with nothing more than a sly smile, a passing grimace, a perfectly timed verbal tic. He thinks hard about his work and works hard at what he does -- he may well be hardest-working self-described "lazy P.O.S." in showbiz. And most of all, he has that enigmatic flair for fourth-wall disruption, for making comedy spill off the stage and out of the screen and into the real world, that has marked the work of comic pioneers from Jack Benny to Sasha Baron Cohen.

So why the hell isn't he a huge-ass star? He's achieved some cult success with six seasons on Fox's late-night sketch comedy series "MADtv," but after 12 years in the business, Lee's just getting his first meaty role in a major feature film -- playing Aki "Chilly Chill" Terasaki in Jamie Kennedy's retro break-dance flick "Kickin' It Old Skool."

"Is it a masterpiece? Well, it is what it is," says Lee. "It's funny. It's nostalgic. I had the best time of my life doing it, and it's a real ensemble piece -- I get to flex some comedy muscle. But I don't have any illusions. I didn't turn down any Scorsese films to do this film. Jamie basically forced the producers to put me into this movie -- he had to convince them: 'This guy, he's one of the funniest guys out there.' They were like, 'We have no idea who the hell he is.'"

Knocking on the Door

Part of the problem is that "MADtv" has always been perceived as second string to NBC's venerable "Saturday Night Live" franchise -- the perennial not-quite-there-yet rival, Hyundai to "SNL"'s Honda, or maybe Kia to "SNL"'s Hyundai. The show has yet to platform any major stars (unless Orlando Jones is your measure of a major star) and was slightly hamstrung out of the gate by its reliance on the Mad magazine brand: "We're, like, contractually obligated to do all these parodies," says Lee. "It's a show based on Mad -- that's what they do."

Lee joined the cast in its seventh season. "I will admit, my first three years there sucked!" he says. "Every episode, it was me as Connie Chung, me doing Jackie Chan." Connie and Jackie aren't the only Asians Lee has had to impersonate over the years: He's mugged an all-star parade of Asian celebs, from Lucy Liu to Soon Yi Previn and Michelle Kwan, from Yao Ming to William Hung to Apl.de.Ap of the Black Eyed Peas. "But over time, they've really given me the chance to grow there, to find my voice -- that's something I appreciate. I haven't had to do Jackie Chan in three years. That's progress, right?"

What's interesting about Lee's tenure on the show is that the personas and sketches he's developed are unabashedly Asian but also, in many cases, undeniably different -- and smart. Sure, he throws his all into cheesy, crowd-pleasing movie parodies like the hilarious but one-note "Memoirs of a Geisha" sketch (me love you long time, yeah, we get it; it's Lee's facile mugging and willingness to utterly embarrass himself that makes it work).

But immerse yourself deeply enough in Bobby Lee's world and you'll find yourself face to face with Dadaist translator Bae Sung -- tagline "Uh-oh, hot dog!"; with a bald, Benny Hill-esque North Korean nuclear scientist who can silly-walk with the best of the Pythons; with the brilliantly slapstick Blind Kung Fu Master; and yes, with squarely Asian American characters like street-racer wannabe Tank and "average Asian" Hideki, who lives in a world where every non-Asian speaks to him in haiku and asks him to school them in the "deadly secrets of the ninja." Some performers might be ticked off at being boxed into being a show's Resident Asian Guy. Lee revels in it, in part because he doesn't believe in boxes.

"I know I'm funny," he says. "It's not a cockiness thing -- I just came out f-- up that way. I know I can get laughs anywhere, in front of any crowd, if I'm given the chance. And there are tons of Asian guys out there who are animals, who just kill 'em, so it's not like we have to prove that Asians can be funny anymore. Koreans are hilarious. My dad, he'll be in a group of total strangers and just cut loose with a fart. He doesn't give a crap. Anyone that meets my parents laughs their asses off -- they're just naturally funny people."

Korean Power

It's Lee's Koreanness that powers some of his most brilliant sketches. There's the running Korean soap opera "Attitudes and Feelings, Both Desirable and Sometimes Secretive" -- which stars Lee as Dr. Poon Ji-Sum, Cathy Shim as his possibly dead but then mysteriously resurrected maybe-sister, maybe-lover Ms. Bong Long and Sung Kang (of "The Motel" and "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" fame) as the suave but thuggish President Gin Kew Yun Chun Yew Nee.

From the sketch's very first moments, when Lee encounters his lover on a set of stone steps, both of them for some reason holding spinning pinwheels, and then air-kisses her only to have her drop dead in slow motion, the cliches of Korean melodrama are both celebrated and skewered in a fashion that you kind of have to be Korean to really appreciate. But even non-Koreans (like me, for instance) can connect with the sketch's burgeoning, eclectic weirdness.

"A lot of people love it," says Lee. "They'll say, 'That's the most hilarious thing I've ever seen.' And an equal number of people call me up and say: 'I hate that soap opera sketch. I don't get it.' I realize that not everyone's going to like the smart stuff, the nuanced stuff. That's why I don't mind doing things like that 'Geisha' skit. Sometimes you gotta do a sketch for the people, and most people want easy s--."

There's a middle ground, however: stuff that's smart but also easy to connect with. Screwed-up families, for instance -- the fuel that powers prime-time comedy. And that whole model-minority thing aside, Asian families can be as screwed up as any others.

Asians Gone Bad

"You gotta understand, there are two different kinds of Asians -- the kind who are good at school, obey their parents, go to college -- that kind of stuff," says Lee. "And then you have my family -- me, my brother, all of my cousins -- we're just wretched people. Dropouts, perverts, druggies -- people who just came out wrong, you know? It's not my parents' fault, but when Asians go bad, they really go bad. I have all these photos of me at 8 years old, and in every single one, I'm flipping off the camera."

Lee's parents owned a clothing store in San Diego -- actually, at one point, a chain of clothing stores -- and expected their son to follow in their footsteps as a retailer. So did Bobby, who in his teens and 20s had "nothing realistic as a goal. I was such a loser. I had hair down to my knees, zits all over my face, I did drugs, I went through a few rehabs. Chicks did not dig me. When I found stand-up, it was like finding home. Six months after I started, this really hot chick wanted me to do her. Like, it just turned my life around. So now I'm still a total loser, but at least I feel like part of the human race."

Self-esteem issues aside, Lee knows he has it pretty good. "You know, it's hard as hell to get into this business. I still have to audition for stuff. I go out for the Asian roles, the nonspecific 'any ethnicity' roles where a total freak show shows up -- the fat black guy, the 7-foot skinny white guy, the midget and me -- and I'm like, 'This sucks.' But once you're inside, it's great. I'm not out there doing a real job -- I'm just a guy out there who gets to spend his time making people laugh. It's the best life ever."

Lee's conviction that Korean people are funny, his desire to give something back to his long-suffering parents and his general go-for-broke attitude about comedy have all converged in recent seasons of "MADtv": He's taken to casting his family and friends in sketches every chance he gets. Lee's brother has a nonspeaking role in his wildly popular North Korean scientist sketch. "He's the guy who just stands there, wearing these thick glasses," says Lee. "My brother's actually been in like 23 sketches. He hates it -- the whole time, he's always, 'When is this done? Get me the hell out of here.' But he's the only guy I trust -- I know he's going to do exactly what I want him to do. And then there's my mom and dad. They live in Phoenix now, and I just fly them out to be on the show whenever I need them."

The pièce de résistance of Lee's focus on his family is probably a sketch he did with cast member Ike Barinholtz, in which Barinholtz comes over for dinner at the Lee family residence. Lee's dad tries to make conversation by asking if Barinholtz is a Jew. Barinholtz brings Korean food he cooked himself, only to have Lee's parents look at him stone-faced and tell him they've bought cheese pizza. They ask him to say grace, prompting him to do his best synagogue cantor impression; they lose patience after 30 seconds of chanting and begin eating the pizza without him. Then there's the family tradition of post-dinner musical theater -- and it only gets stranger from there.

Lee's parents and brother do amazing deadpan turns -- not cracking a grin when putting on an amazing home-brew version of the Luke/Vader duel from "The Empire Strikes Back," or even when they end up naked in a bathtub with Barinholtz -- lending the whole exercise an aura of hyperreality and weirdness that central casting couldn't possibly ever duplicate.

The results are terrific TV and nothing like previous efforts to grind comic grist from the Asian American family mill -- such as, for instance, Margaret Cho's "All American Girl." "Margaret is incredible. She's a goddess -- I get scared when I'm in her presence," says Lee. "The problem is, 'All American Girl' was just too watered down. First of all, Margaret should have cast an all-Korean cast as her family. Asians can tell. It's just not believable; they all look different. And it's a network show -- by the time the network people get through with something like that, it's totally lost its essence."

That's why, given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to develop a show for Comedy Central, Lee told them he wanted to do a show about a screwed-up Asian American family -- his. Starring his real family. "It's like an extension of that sketch, but obviously, a lot more in-depth," says Lee. "And I'm going to make it really Korean. It's going to be set predominantly in Koreatown, and it'll be a totally ethnic comedy show, shot single-camera, kind of like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' only with singing, dancing. Maybe some sketches and animation. They bought the idea -- we'll see if it ever gets on the air."

If it does, it'll be a landmark: A no-holds-barred look at the surreal world of Asian America, from the inside. "My parents came to America with no aspirations at all to be in showbiz -- they don't even know what it is," says Lee. "But I've been telling them, it's a great life. It's a great life. And having a f-- up son, who for some reason or other made it, and now they're along for the ride. They wanted me to go into retail, and I got them into comedy. You can't plan that. I'd like to think of it as a gift I can give them in their old age."

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PopMailMore Asian funny business afoot: Check out Sung H. Kim and Kibi Anderson's "The Mighty Warriors of Comedy," an intimate documentary of San Francisco's own world-beating sketch comedy troupe, the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors. Declared the uncontested winners of the 2006 International Sketch Comedy Championships, the Warriors bring razor-sharp satire and effortless goofballery to the service of making people laugh with, not at, Asian American foibles and frustrations. The doc had its premiere at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Fest and is out now on DVD; more information available at the DVD's official Web site, www.mightywarriorsofcomedy.com.